Tuesday, September 6, 2011

A
flood of conservatism

Italy
and France have long had conservative governments. Recently Spain and
Britain have voted for conservative governments. The Netherlands,
long a bastion of liberalism, has turned to the right in recent
years; Canada has a very conservative Prime Minister. In the Iowa
caucuses, Michele Bachmann won the most votes.

Everywhere
we look, conservatism appears to be in the ascendant. In times of
tremendous suffering for people without jobs, for those who are
underemployed or only earn minimum wage, large layers of the
population seem to be most concerned about the taxes of
multimillionaires. Many people worry most about the tax rate of
corporations who, in fact, manage to get away with paying no taxes at
all.

How
can we understand that? One assumption underlying our advocacy of
democracy is that most people are the best judge of what they need
and what is in their best interest. But now large numbers of people
who are not particularly living in the lap of luxury are supporting
governments determined to cut services for the poor and taxes for the
rich. The conservative advocates of small government are eager to
scale back services to low and middle income Americans but no one has
so far mentioned the possibility of cutting the tax write offs for
oil companies or the price support for large agricultural
corporations.

Are
we wrong about democracy? Are most people too uninformed or too
irrational recognize their own self-interest, let alone the good for
all?

The
worldwide wave of conservatism appears to challenge our confidence in
democracy.

One
kind of response to this worry about the soundness of democracy as a
political system is to assert, in effect, that we do not have a
democracy. People give different reasons for that. One of them points
to the overwhelming power of money in our political system. Rich
people who can pay for advertisements and lobbyists on a grand scale
are effectively in power. The rest of us with limited incomes have no
real say. Ours is not a democracy but an oligarchy – the rule of
the few with lots of money.

A
different response blames our political problems on mass media and
that, once again, leads us back to the overwhelming power of money in
politics but also in mass communications.

There
is some justification for both of the these complaints, but both are
incomplete.

The
advocates of democracy tend to believe that most people are able to
figure out what is best for them. But that is not true. Our world is
very complicated. None of us can see into the future and predict with
confidence what will happen. We can therefore rarely be sure about
the consequences of actions we are thinking of taking. Even the
smartest of us, even the most intelligent and well-informed
constantly make mistakes. Just think of Afghanistan, Iraq, Lehman
Brothers. Democracy is justified not because all of us have
infallible crystal balls, but, on the contrary, because when it comes
to foreseeing the future none of us are much better off than the
least informed.

Ascendancy
of the political left and ascendancy of the political right therefore
come and go in sequence. An existing government may have successes
but it always also has problems and the electorate tends to move away
from prevailing orthodoxies to the opposite in the hope that the
parties, currently out of power, will find solutions to the problems
which the ruling parties have been unable to solve. If, in the US,
the Republicans end up with serious difficulties, the Democrats gain
power. If they don't solve the problems they inherited and/or
created, the electorate will give a chance to the opposite party.

In
a situation where the doctrinal differences between the major parties
are very small, popular discontent may well move to the fringes of
the political spectrum. Hence the popularity of Sarah Palin or
Michelle Bachman. They testify to widespread disillusionment with the
standard, middle-of-the-road politicians – Republican or
Democrat.

The
worldwide wave of conservatism is not proof that we should surrender
our dedication to democracy. But it does suggest that we should
rethink the reasons for valuing democracy. Democracy is not good
because we are all experts but because even the so-called experts
are fallible. Democracy is good because we should be allowed to make
our own mistakes instead of – as we are doing at present –
suffering the damages done by the mistakes of experts.